Using your domain name for additional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Most companies and organisations want to have a  domain name that matches the name of their business, club, organisation etc.

This makes good sense if you are a big multinational company as people will specifically want your goods or services and can make a guess at what your website address is.

What if you are a small organisation that isn’t well known around the world?  Most people will be completely unaware of your existence or what it is that your are offering to the world.

The domain name of your site is processed, along with the rest of the text on your site.  Most search engines give text found in the domain name relatively high rankings.  For this reason, it is a good idea to try and utilise this opportunity if at all possible.

Review your top search phrases you deduced for your site and try and find a corresponding domain name that has not been taken.  For example, let us imagine your site sells shaving brushes and one of your top phrases is badger shaving brushes (NB: in case you didn’t know, all the best shaving brushes are made from badger hair).  You could have a look to see if the domain name www.badger-shaving-brushes.com (or similar) is still available (it was when I looked).

Note the use of hyphens in my example.  These give a better result than underscores because most search engines assume underscores are part of the word whereas they will split the domain name up into constituent words if ir contains hyphens.

There is nothing to stop you using a domain name that does match your business or organisation name as well.  Nothing to stop you linking the two domains together.  Ask you hosting provider for advice on how to do this.

Domain name extension

Commercial websites should use an extension of .com or .co.uk (for United Kingdom – corresponding extensions are available for other countries).  If using a country-specific extension, only use the one that is relevant to your own country.

Non-commercial ventures are still free to use .com or .co.uk (etc) or could also consider .org or .org.uk (for UK, corresponding extensions available for other countries).

If your website relates entirely to Internet matters then the .net extension is also acceptable.

Personally, I would avoid using any of the weird and wonderful new extensions such as .biz, .gb.com, .uk.com etc as nobody seems to take them seriously.